Many (most)lenders specialize in just a few loan speciality types, which may not include the type that would be optimal for your particular situation.2.

It's just a fire hose of information and a menu of unnecessary expenses for a new investor that puts the cart before the horse. 

One hill I will die on is optimizing for minimal assembly.

To choose an optimal investment location, follow these steps:Select a city with a metro population >1M and sustained and significant population growth.

Our electricity bill went from $4100 / year to $833/year (with added 2 EVs)With that being said, to answer the question of ROI, it is SO dependent on your usage and local pricing scheme, and you really have to do your own homework to dial in the right system set up to achieve the optimal results.

It's great you want to optimize your property management on your first two, but you should also optimize the properties themselves before looking to buy anything else.

Need to be able to view, edit, and save changes.Unit / Lease Abstract View: Customizable view that allows user to select a given property and provides a menu for that property of all tenants/units at that property.

Im actually not going to do that quite yet...but I suggest you both take a look at all the options available for financing, and using debt as leverage, and how to optimize them for investing and paying off mortgage debt...there are some really good strategies for using a HELOC to leverage towards real estate investments and paying down mortgages as well as other installment and revolving accounts (secured and unsecured) and I suggest you do your research before coming to any conclusions on this.

My concern with both the refi and sale option is getting less than optimal terms if the NOI isn't there to justify the values. 

Continuous evaluation of market trends also played a key role in setting the optimal sale price.